Message to low-level API developers: “With great power comes great responsibility”

John Spitzer, Vice President of the GameWorks Labs at Nvidia, took the stage during the company’s Editors Day to discuss the age-old debate between high-level and low-level API performance for the latest game releases.

He says that in the early 1980s through the early 1990s, there was competition between PHIGS and IRIS GL APIs. Now, there is competition between DX11 and OpenGL, DirectX 12 and Vulkan. However, “one is not necessarily better than the other,” he explains.